124303-want-more-players-lfrduty-finder-page-8
Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4, Page 5, Page 6, Page 7, Page 8 Content The work to do 3 though would also benefit raiding guilds as in order to even think of doing 3 you would have to go from instance locking to boss locking. That would be the majority of the work most likely as GA and DS are already "wings" so to speak. | |} ---- That's rich man. Believe me, you are the last person on these forums whose predictions I will consider. Tell me again how CREDD is never going to go over 2 plat. | |} ---- I think the "raid wing" concept would be a huge leap forward. People would be able to work on bosses or groups of bosses rather than the entire raid. | |} ---- I'm not following. | |} ---- I agree. But every PvP match will cost you 2 CREDD from then on. | |} ---- Well we'd weigh it by development time. Datascape costs 1 credd per week to access. Carbine gives people 1 CREDD every 2 weeks for access to PvP. | |} ---- That's not how this little game works. | |} ---- ---- DS was released as a 40-man raid and was still being retuned up to the two weeks before it was replaced with DS20--which is still being retuned. So with all due respect, Datascape has been under continual maintenance since launch and we're coming up on the game's first anniversary soon. | |} ---- OK, so you listed some stuff saying this is why LFR shouldn't be made because of how development affects the game right? Since no feature is in a vacuum? I turned that around and used your reasoning as to why no new raids should be made. Because, as you said, no feature is in a vacuum right? Everything you said, save the part about "And all to try and to offer an end-game mode to players it was never intended for.", applies to creating new raids as well. And my answer to that part is, intentions can change when money/financial situations dictate otherwise. | |} ---- ---- “The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.” | |} ---- An LFR? :D | |} ---- I am pretty sure Yas, Jeff and Lethal could keep it going (in an endless loop) for at least another 45-50 pages, easy. :lol: ;) | |} ---- Oh, don't blame me! My post count in this thread has been pretty low for quite a while. | |} ---- Except I'm not asking for new raids. I'm asking to keep the current raids sanctified (and that by the very nature will extend the life of them). Carbine should focus on creating content for people that think they want LFR (but don't realize they really don't) | |} ---- What, did you expect someone to make a thread about something they're enjoying? It's a lot easier to keep a thread going about something you don't, even if I'm pretty sure most of the posters here haven't even really tried to raid. | |} ---- Except I have raided. And I still want to talk about this, am I now allowed to talk about this subject? The life of the raid will only last so long as the power creep stops. With the introduction of new gear, new dungeons that will creep up on GA and eventually pass it, players will get geared enough to trivialize mechanics and such. I don't believe the WoW type LFR will not affect the life of the raid, because it isn't the actual raid. Just because you do "easy mode GA" (and not get the GA gear, you didn't do real GA), you'd still have to do real GA to get attuned to DS or get gear that will let you be more powerful. ANd to be honest, I don't want the WoW type LFR, I'd rather GA/DS be broken into wings and made queue-able. I find that to be more appealing and also helps out actual raid teams with boss locking instead of instance locking. And we're back to not knowing what we want, of course we don't. We have no idea what we want. Mind telling me what I do want? I think I want ice cream, but I'm not very sure since I'm just a customer. I swear if you say that people who want LFR should try housing for casual content I might break something chua-ish. Most infuriating answer I've ever seen. | |} ---- I would never say that. But let's talk about this statement. What, other than seeing the inside of the room, would an LFR raid give you that some other activity in the game does not? Edit: I feel like I need to state that this is an honest question... I'm not trying to troll a response! Seriously, what would be available... gameplay, reward, or otherwise, that isn't currently available another way? | |} ---- ---- Some of the people asking for LFR just want it in group finder, but not a less challenging version. | |} ---- What Jeff said. For me? Broken down into wings and queueable in the LFG is what I want. It absolutely must be the same difficulty and reward the same loot. I do however understand where the people asking for an "easy mode" LFR version of the raid come from. Some want something in between dungeon -> raid. Something that is a little easier and accessible and still large group (not Scorchwing). I think creating an instance with Scorchwing like level of difficulty (maybe a harder?) would be that bridging gap, and no I'm not talking gear necessarily. Others want to just see GA and Datascape, but cannot handle the time commitment (the biggest complaint I've seen) and others say make it easier because they just want to experience. I believe Timetravel can deliver that second part without trivializing GA. I don't think re-running content and having easy/hard modes is necessarily a bad thing if the easy mode is just a "tour" so to speak , a taste of what GA really is. | |} ---- Oh everyone's allowed to talk about it, but a lot of people make assumptions about the raids without ever having done them. About their accessibility, viability, difficulty, etc. A common theme seems to be that more people would raid if these were then changed. However, there are quite a few reasons to say this might not be the best action. Let's take accessibility. People routinely decry group sizes, and want the raids to be smaller (such as the concept of having a ten man raid). However, we already have five man dungeons, which are far more accessible than a ten man raid already. Another difficult dungeon would fill that void nicely; without causing the sorts of problems we were having with two raid sizes before. But, importantly, this is a position that makes two assumptions: that a twenty man raid is by definition inaccessible and that a smaller size is the solution. And that assumption is fairly routinely being made by people who haven't set foot in GA. Generally, those people who have come to a different conclusion, that the potential inaccessibility of raiding is generally related to the inflexibility of the lockout system, that locking the loot by boss rather than locking the player to the instance would offer more flexibility. It would make it a lot easier to fill gaps in your roster if your two raid teams could intertwine and you could run a separate series. That's why the experience portion is fairly important to the conversation. People who don't raid in Wildstar have a tendency to paint it the way they imagine it, not the way it is, and very often hold themselves to be a static center of gaming rather than understanding themselves in the broader context of the population. Or, more simply, people who don't raid because, in reality, they don't like most of the elements of raiding (large groups, complex team mechanics, higher culpability) and are therefore not raiding for the correct reasons are misunderstanding their intentions. There's no shame in saying, "Until more guilds finish DS, maybe CRB should focus on another tier of instances on GA's level now." That may be a lot more valuable in the end than an LFR raid, for whatever reason it would be built. High-level five man content already has a lot of the elements of short-man raiding in other games, only it uses even less people and are invariably able to be completed in a shorter time frame. | |} ---- ---- While I do agree with you, as a former WS guild leader, I can easily say that the jump from 5 to 20 man was difficult. Especially for guilds that hadn't cleared GA yet at the start as guilds who had cleared some of GA were hemorrhaging players, stealing em from guilds who were still trying to build rosters. Getting players at that time to stay in the guild was nearly impossible as they just jumped to guilds that were already in GA. While you can argue (and I'll agree somewhat) that these might not be players I want in my guild as they're flaky jump shippers, I still needed the bodies for my core family to even step into an instance where we could play together. Having more 5 man instances is great. However, I had a 10/11 man roster of people who wanted to play together with no real content for us except to break into 2 5 mans. A 10 man instance would have been great in our case. I think smaller group sizes facilitates in creating groups as the numbers are smaller, so therefore easier to fill out. It's why my guild loved the raid sizes in SW:TOR as the 8 man instance was something we could fill out every week with our small numbers while we recruited more for the larger 16 man raid. I do also think that the loot lockout instead of instance lockout is much much better. I | |} ---- If that's the core ask, then I would beg those folks to consider what that does to social interaction. If the time is taken to really meet the community and make friends, friends turn into reliable teammates who can help them succeed in the very raids they wish to run. With an auto-matching raid finder that will never happen and only result in further asks due to player frustration. They will then want easier raids, etc. If people need a "tool" to help them find other people, such as the one you are creating, then I can see some of that. But raids just cannot facilitate auto-mathicng, and vice-versa. | |} ---- Just like dungeons couldn't facilitate matching because they were too "hard"? Look where we are today, people pug dungeons and complete them. Will eventually happen with raids as well, how far in the future I have no idea. The more power creep there is, the more GA and DS will get nerfed. I play solo already while I look for a guild. At least I can queue up for a raid and maybe fill some guilds spot who needs another player and get to meet some of the raiding guilds that way too. | |} ---- ---- If you're being honest, what is the success rate (not to mention queue time) of Veteran SSM, or heck any dungeon? Raids would only be worse on both counts. I'm still trying to get an answer though... what would that LFR group give you that you cannot already get by playing other areas of the game? | |} ---- Pretty high as far as I know. Unless you only count "gold" as success. | |} ---- ---- I don't disagree with you, there's certainly a nice sense of compromise in what you say. It's actually the last point on your list that I'm not too convinced by: I think pouring time into developing new raids specifically for "casual" players might be the hard way to do things, it would be nice, but it wouldn't be the best for all parties involved. Thinking about how long GA and DS have been in the game, I'm imagining that there are plenty of Raiders out there chomping at the bit for that "next challenge". Building a new raid that doesn't take that aspect of the content to the next level, so to speak, would be doing a pretty massive disservice to the Raiding Community in Wildstar. I think one of the reasons why people are suggesting (well my reason) is because we're pretty sure that Duplicating the code for the Raids already in the game and then adjusting the Duplicated information to allow for an LFR style version of the raid would be the least costly/most effective compromise both in terms of time and money. I personally would recommend exactly that: Duplicate what is there, adjust the duplicate, make the focus of development on the next Raid, and then a month or two later just "lather-rinse-repeat". I think that kind of approach would accomplish 2 things: 1- The guilds that are currently Raiding will have a fresh new Raid to sink their teeth into, and thus curb stagnation for that crowd. 2- Provide non-Raiding players with some accessible "new" content to enjoy, and also curb stagnation. Realistically, I'm not a developer, so take what I say with a grain of salt when it comes to anything programming related. I would also like to address the comment about "not forcing people to do the same content twice". I think that would be very, very easy to accomplish. Keeping the rewards for the LFR version of the content on par with other pre-Raid level content would simply offer an alternative to what is currently there (and has probably been done), but it should not require anyone to actually participate in LFR if they don't want to (but let's face fact - people repeat all forms of content way more than just twice - it's an MMO, that's just what people do). You do have some good ideas, but as far as the feelings associated with "experiencing the actual thing for the first time"... well, that's personal. Limiting peoples options isn't going to force them to feel the way others do about any one specific thing. People just don't work that way. It's nice that you're offering to mentor people though! (compliment sandwich: complete) | |} ---- ---- That would be a different approach to what other MMOs I've played have done. I can certainly see myself taking advantage of a more "boss-in-a-box" style of Raiding. Either way there's going to be some backlash if Carbine decides to implement either LFR or Segmented Raids (I can see some pretty sizeable complaints about how "the filthy casuals don't have to budget their time like I did and they still get the good stuff! Instant gratification blah blah blah!"). But, sure, if Carbine broke down their Raids into bite-sized chunks so that I could just jump in with a group of randoms between dinner and diaper changes, I'd give it a try. | |} ---- I think those people who would complain about filthy casuals have mostly left this game already. | |} ---- As others answered you, pretty successful. I pugged a UPG yesterday, we did great and got all the way to the last boss and only quit cause our healer and tank both had to head out. I also did a pug SSM and we would have gotten gold if I didn't die to falling off the platforms because sometimes when I run and jump, I don't actually jump so my char just ran off the cliff. I blame being from the Middle East and playing on an NA server for that though. I personally haven't experienced many "bad" dungeons unless the tank/healer can't do their job as I can almost solo carry the DPS in most instances, even Stormtalon, so I just need a decent healer/tank combo and we're normally good. As for other content there really isn't any areas of the game that caters to large groups looking for something to chew their teeth on in smaller bites that isn't raids. Scorchwing and the like don't count, as I'm talking about something instanced that could at least "feel" like group progression. When WS launched I had a 50/70 man guild roster and many of those were average players who had hard times in dungeons (normal versions), having something as a step between the dungeon difficulty -> raid difficulty for a large group to practice on would be nice. | |} ---- But this is what I am getting at. You do not get the "large group" experience in an LFR. You do not "raid". There is no coordination or communication. There is no socialization. LFR is a solo experience entirely. | |} ---- I've done many LFG raids in SW:TOR (same difficulty as if I would have a raid team) and there certainly was socializing, communication and coordination. I've had: People joking in chat, getting to know each other People offer a Teamspeak/Mumble/Vent for use People asking if others do not know the fights so they can explain mechanics Healers dividing workloads, tanks deciding maintank & offtank DPS splitting up into groups if necessary by talking to each other and volunteering for mechanic duty if needed On failures had teams asses what went wrong and address the problem I've made many friends running those LFG's in that game and got to know a lot of good players and added them to my friends list. I also learned who to avoid and which guilds I certainly don't want to run with. Hell, I have an app for Overwolf that has explanations for every single boss fight in that game (all raids and dungeons) for every role where I just hotkey and it copy + pastes what I want to write so I can explain stuff to new people or just recap to make sure. Solo experience? Maybe just queuing up sure. But that above is a social experience, and it certainly sounds like a raid to me. Edit- Actually, just to compound how social it was, my current co-leader of the guild I run (not in WS sadly) is someone I met IN the LFG where we became extremely close 2.5 years ago since we kept running into each other in the LFG and PvP. | |} ---- Ok, let's assume then the experience in SW:TOR is different than the experience in WoW. What makes the two different? Note, I don't play SW:TOR so have no idea how their "LFR" works. Do you queue? Are the raids tuned down? What are the mechanical differences? Once we define that, we can start to assess why, if what you say is true, is true. | |} ---- OK sure. First, let's explain how the raid works. 3 difficulties - Normal, Hard, Nightmare (normally not released at the debut of the raid, but at a later date) - There are added mechanics as you progress in difficulty as well as highe health and strength of enemies inside the raid. Boss lockouts - You kill a boss, you cannot kill it again that week. You also cannot join a raid that needs to kill this boss to progress, unless you were party lead. If you're party lead and someone didn't kill the previous bosses, he/she receives a popup asking if he/she is OK with skipping to be able to enter the party and ist then locked from those bosses as well for that week. If you would enter the instance, all bosses up to that boss would not be there however trash would. Gear is tokens + stated gear - The only good gear in this game is the token gear. The non-token gear has high endurance (health) and mainstat but has lower secondary stats. In TOR, secondary stats are very important so you would prefer having an item that has 80 mainstat/50health/115 secondary stat over 100 mainstat/100health/75 secondary stat (please ignore the numbers, they are NOT relevant, just that mainstat to secondary stat compromise). Also, only token gear has set bonuses and can only be gotten by killing bosses. Set bonuses are extremely important. The LFG there does NOT have an easier instance, there is NO mechanical difference between the LFG and getting your team together and going into the instance. However, through the games LFG you can only queue for the normal version of the latest raids which rotate each day. There is an added reward for commendations for completing the raid through that group finder. Regardless of that, I have pugged the hard modes for the raids through chat. Also, to just give an example of the mechanics: for one of the latest raids called Temple of Sacrifice the 2nd boss requires 2 tanks to separately tank different mobs and tank swap. While that is happening, one of the mobs is invulnerable indefinitely until one DPS Luke Skywalkers one of the bosses (for those who don't know what that means, check this) then it can be damaged for a short while. There are only 5 bombs for the DPS to use so you have to kill it within that time frame of it's vulnerability AS WELL AS kill the other boss at the same time. If the bosses die separately, the other will enrage and will wipe the group. | |} ---- I agree it would be different. But my take has always been that these fights are really, really fun, and that's why I wouldn't want to see them nerfed. I don't care about the content being exclusive for those who can schedule time. Especially not GA. | |} ---- So you're OK with locking content like that? Wouldn't a better solution be to make it easier so people without 3/4 hours have a way to get in there and see this amazing raid? As in, breaking them into wings and queue-able? | |} ---- What I'm saying is wings and queuable is a much better than changing the content itself. I think you could break down GA into three wings. Act 1, then Act 2 into two halves. Yes, initially each of these on its own might take pugs a while to get comfortable with, but eventfully I could see each being downed in two hours, which is reasonable for a raid and seems to be bit sized enough. I wouldn't want to boss-in-a-box the encounters, but the trash is part of the experience too (and the trash in GA is pretty cool). I do think you'd have a lot of pugs not finishing Act 1 because of Kuralak, but they'd be able to get down three minis and x-89 pretty quickly, and Kuralak would come in time just like Mordaci. And maybe you stick Gravatron and Kuralak in their own "wing" to break it into four chunks. But it could work. | |} ---- ---- But it might also be helpful to give puts different "starting points" in the group finder so everyone isn't always queuing for a fresh GA. | |} ---- In the case of a manual reset that is loot locked, they wouldn't be. They might be queueing into quite a few GAs already in progress. | |} ---- Right, but you'd want to queue into the one you were prepared to do. If you've got experience with X-89 and Kuralak, queuing up and getting a group working on Ohmna wouldn't be that great, especially if you weren't geared for it. | |} ---- I'm just trying to give the LFR people what they want :) Personally, I'm fine with it NOT being in the group finder and adding loot lock outs, but it wouldn't bother me too much to have different "queue points" for players who want sizable chunks. | |} ---- That's more an issue calling for a bulletin-board style group finder rather than an autoqueueing system. | |} ---- It doesn't necessarily bother me, but it does raise the specter of what you do if it works the other way, and someone just jumps to the end of GA even without gear. At that point, you'd essentially have to make sure someone couldn't queue into a raid beyond their point of progression. | |} ---- This is what I'd like to see. I'm a guy with VERY fluid game time. It's improved somewhat since I'm not working and doing school at the same time, but it's still up in the air whether I'll have the time on any given week to run a raid from start to finish. Raid wings would let me and people like me run through the whole content on a longer time frame. One wing this week, another next week, and so on. | |} ---- Ok, so SW:TOR creates "harder" versions of raids rather than dumbing them down, which is a good thing. I'd propose though that WildStar raids are harder than Nightmare, as they certainly post a challenge that matches or surpassed WoW's Mythic raids. For the same reason SW:TOR doesn't offer LFR to Hard or Nightmare mode, WildStar couldn't offer LFR to their raid without making an easier version. One other element that may play into having a more civil LFR experience is the size of the community. Smaller communities like SW:TOR may benefit from that as well, and that's something WildStar may benefit from too. WoW is a cesspool of anonymous idiots. | |} ---- Yep- well, you wouldn't be able to queue for Convergence/Ohmna if you hadn't gotten down both Phage Maw and Prototypes. | |} ---- Just as an FYI, there ARE raid groups out there that can work with you. Like mine: we raid Friday and Saturday nights. We have signups and try to get people at least one night of the weekend if they are available. As long as people can tell me their availability for the weekend, they can be pretty fluid. I'm sure we are not the only raid group that works that way, and we've been pretty successful (we are now 4/6 raiding only two nights a week with a group that changes some composition every week- though there are a lot of people who are there every week to provide consistency). | |} ---- IDK if you'd call 1.3 million players a small community... It may not be WoW sized, but it's one of the largest MMO's out there. Wildstar has what, 10% of that population? And they do offer Hard mode through the LFR of the old raids, just not the new ones. Anyway, my point is that you don't need an easier version of the raid, if people communicate through chat (possible), offer TS/mumble/vent for people to hop into (also possible) and do any or all of the things I listed there that happens in TOR. This game IS harder yes, but that is irrelevant as in both cases you have to rise to the challenge of completing the instance. Even in TOR the raids are not cleared by pugs even in LFG for a while. It took 3/4 months till people started clearing it through LFG for the new raids. That raid encounter I described was the "pug" killer, it was the point where raids would break and could go no further for a few months because it was very very difficult to time the damage swap and do equal damage on the 2 targets to get them down at the same time. In WS it will take longer for some bosses, but due to small playerbase, we'd probably see more raiders in the LFG on alts, we might see this happen quicker than we think as well. | |} ---- That sort of becomes the issue. It would help people who full-cleared it, but it really limits other people who might want to run. That's going to get even messier when you get a group of 20 together, you try to kick off Ohmna, and you can't because someone in your group hasn't cleared it yet. The best answer is to simply not let someone come with a group that is on a checkpoint beyond his own personal progression, but that can already be a pain now trying to figure out who hasn't unlocked an adventure. | |} ---- What if... in your personal stat window there was another tab/section for "Lockouts". Would help you see that and could update dynamically to show everyone in your groups lockout too. | |} ---- That's great to see! I'm going to have to get into a guild soon. My gaming community no longer manages a guild for WildStar so I'm out in the cold at the moment. | |} ---- It's possible it would take longer. And I can't really say about Ohmna. But from what I've experienced, one place this game really excels at is teaching people to play better. The telegraph system is so good for helping people figure out what went wrong that I think the community would actually grow in skill if they had more access to these fights. It was an interesting comment I had with one of our officers about pugging folks outside of our raid group. I told him I didn't mind picking up an odd pug here or there if we were short for an evening. What he said was "I wouldn't in any other game, but in WS I think the average players is good enough that it works". It was a complement to the player base, but also about a game that really is designed to help people get better. If people have made it through the dungeons and are attuned, the odds are good that they are capable of receiving instruction and executing well enough to contribute. Sure, a dedicated group is going to learn this stuff faster. But I don't underestimate the communal ability to learn. The biggest coordination blocks do seem to be Kuralak and Ohmna, and I can see pugs really struggling with these. But I have confidence that a few good leaders and some publicly linked google spreadsheets (or in game add ons) could eventually bridge the gap. | |} ---- That's not a bad idea at all! I think it might be a bit more tactful to call it "Progress", but showing what you've completed and what you've completed before the loot reset would be a pretty valuable tool. | |} ---- TBH, can you imagine the high and satisfaction a pug group would feel from downing Kuralak? I mean, I can. With a set group it eventually becomes "daily" but with a pug, you can sort of experience it every time since pugs are like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get. I wouldn't say the playerbase is better, but this game is VERY good at letting you know what you did wrong save the combat log being atrocious. At least in TOR you SEE what killed you easily. The combat log in the chat only shows damage you did and had done to you as well as shows in red lettering "Killed by using for ". However, telegraphs are very good for knowing when you stood in stupid. The combat log in this game drives me nuts with it's ever updating swell of info from the entire group. I would love a way to filter that info and choose what I want to see. I took that idea from TOR. Their quest log has a tab for lockouts and show all the raids and the name of the bosses underneath each raid and whether you killed it or not. If you're in a group, a second row to the right shows up with who in the group is eligible for killing that boss if you click on one. | |} ---- I have this same problem! | |} ---- ----